Stanford Medicine Magazine, Fall 2017

Stanford Medical magazine to create an educational piece to illustrate the general anatomy of the heart and where the aortic valve is. The article is about a surgeon who created a way to use a patient's own tissue to repair an aortic valve.

The link to the full Fall 2017 edition is here.

Copyright Jessica Mayer Koren 2025

As a medical illustrator I often receive the comment "Oh you must know Anatomy so well, you could be a doctor!" To which I say "Of course, the hip bone is connected to the... thigh bone!" The truth is that each project I take on requires a fair amount of research and reorientation of the anatomy. For this project I needed to research with the big guns - watching videos of surgeries, exploring 3D medical models, consulting classic and new medical books and even building miniature models. Whewee! the heart is a complex, twisting, catacomb of organically shaped chambers which change their shape. Another question I am asked frequently is "Why don't you just use a photograph?" To which I say "What's that?!" Just kidding, I'm feeling spicy today. But seriously, this question touches on a larger subject about the role of a medical/science illustrator - which is to communicate important information. With a photograph or even a CT scan of the heart, the overlapping valves and chambers make the anatomy impossible to understand with a mere snapshot. My role is to interpret the anatomy and then to exaggerate, colorize, and simplify - which is an art.

If you want to see a photograph of a heart, here it is:

Does that clear things up for you? Image Source Unknown

I'll share with you some of my process

Another major challenge of this project was how do we show the viewer all of the heart's anatomy as well as single-out the aorta on a half-page illustration. I tried a few ideas, one being to separate the pulmonary valve from the aortic valve. I still think this is a cool idea, but not practical for its end use.

Quick colorization in Photoshop

There are many times when internal anatomical structures of the body have their parallels in the outside world. A bell pepper bottom for instance is a great representation of a tricuspid valve which is exactly the form of an aortic valve. Using the pepper as photo ref then helps me to get my lighting and shadows right when I go to digitally paint it.

Thanks for viewing! If you or your company are in need of high quality medical illustrations, feel free to reach out! -Jessica